This post is not about the Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog but its about me and how I overcame fear of dogs (and pets). To clarify few things, I do not hate dogs as few people have misinterpreted, I am just scared of all the pets. Whenever I encounter some pets, they try to jump over and lick, I always take that as an attempt to bite me and I run away. It’s not the big sized dogs, it can be a small puppy too. I am even scared of small puppies. There have been cases where I was scared of Mr. Townes (picture below) and in attempt to get away from them I have hurt myself.

Townes Van Zandt

The incident that lessened the fear of dogs happened during Spring Break when I visited Wisconsin. When we started out trip, I was told that I would be meeting St. Bernard. I had no clue about them and I thought of them a just a big sized dogs. Just a quick query on Wikipedia revealed that they are very large dogs which were originally bred as rescue dogs. Still, I could not imagine how large they could be. My first (and only) encountered when we entered the farm, and four of St. Bernard came jumping towards us. I was very scared and did not even come out of the car. When my friend got out, I could compare their size with a human and decided against getting out of car. And then I saw something amazing, one of the dogs pushed the front door of house open. This scared me to limit and magnitude of this can be understood from fact that when I friend returned, she found that I have locked the car from inside.

St. Bernards with my friend

Things changed when I stayed with a family who owned a Bichon named Popcorn. He was very active when I first met but soon realized he was not very active. He would sit in the corner and won’t move for long. One evening I was sitting on couch and I did not realize that Popcorn had climbed the couch and was sitting very close to me. Since I was working on laptop I did not realize how close he was, he kept moving closer inch by inch and in sometime he was almost on my lap. He was so slow and silent that I did not think of him more than a pillow. He stayed in that position for around 15-20 minutes and this helped me gain some confidence around him.

Next day we were in Chicago and the family I stayed with had a Bichon named Marley. When I had stayed previously, they had to put Marley in a separate room because of me. This time I didn’t want to trouble them and wanted to ‘face my fear’, so asked them to keep Marley out. He was trying to “pounce” on me as usual, but they told me, it would be best if I let him familiarize with myself. This dog had a peculiarity that to familiarize he would have to smell your breath. It was pretty hard for me to allow that as it has to come close to my face. I sat down and owner held the dog and brought him close to my face. It took me 5 minutes but he understood me and my fear has reduced. Next two hours, we were sitting and talking but Marley kept coming to me. I had to keep petting him or else he would try to smell my breath again. I had to constantly pet him and he was sitting on my lap also few times.

This helped me make “friends” with at least one dog, but I am sure next time I meet a dog I won’t be as scared. Definitely I cannot handle a dog like Marley from the movie but some dogs like Top Gear Dog (labradoodle), which is introvert as well as intelligent can be easy to handle.

Once again the reliable Reliance connection ruined my weekend, full 36 hours of blackout and my unread feed count reached 858. I don’t understand the problem, on weekends their system goes down. This time http traffic was not possible at all, but I managed to download 800MB through torrents.

I was excited to find out about how to take Wikipedia offline using GearsMonkey and was experimenting with it and got disconnected. I had to watch No Smoking, Saawariya, Hot Fuzz and would agree that the reviews of movies were not good. Thanks to tweets that I was well informed, Thej’s adventures in Udaipur and Jaipur, info from Wesleyneo about the cancer treatment (I was unaware of BARC’s involvement) and Prasoon’s updates kept me awake. Manchester United-Bolton match was a disappointment and was wondering how performance of a team differs in both halves.

No smoking is a totally different kind of movie, a movie apart from normal Bollywood flicks and that’s why bad reviews, movie is about how we react to situations, not in the way we want to react, but how society wants us to react. It’s a pity that our reviewers could not understand the depth and discarded a good movie. As Geo points out many times, movie makers are under-estimating the potential of audiences and always come up with same genre of movies and I agree with him at-least with the kind of response given by reviewers.

Saawariya, again is not a bad movie as portrayed. It’s a nice movie, well made but some extra songs and same kind of dialogues makes it sluggish sometimes. But if you can concentrate on other aspects, grandness then you might be able to like (not love) it.

Hot Fuzz is a crazy movie, superb comedy, potential to be a cult comedy movie. After watching Blazing Saddles, Monty Python & Holy Grail and Airplane during the week I was not expecting to laugh this much, but it’s a different class of movie.

I finished Street Lawyer by John Grisham, it’s not a gripping thriller as always, but this book makes you think a lot. If USA can have compulsory pro-bono work, why in India we don’t implement things like that, as a software engineer how can I contribute to society? I was aware of problems with homeless people in India, but never expected that USA also faces problems like this.

Star VOI is hurting me a lot and I want to sue those people, whenever I am surfing channels and I reach there, they only talk about regional votes. I hate it, they are openly promoting regionalism and someone should stop them.

And here I am, back to office, enjoying the six wicket victory

Spending Deewali away from home is always sad, reminding of every Deewali spent at home, fun and the family gathering. This was my first in Bangalore and none of the friends (except Geo) were here. This weekend when everyone around was talking about Om Shanti Om and Saawariya, I decided to stick with classics. I saw Die Hard 1, 2, 3, Shawshank Redemption, Godfather 1, 2, Donnie Brasco and Airplane. I also finished The Client and almost done with The Street Lawyer.
On Deewali, I decided to light up the place and click some photographs (Deepak, Flares in Sky, Crackers)

(Sequel of Chak de India)

There was a team, nobody wanted to coach, no one was ready to sponsor. But one guy stood up to the challenge, the guy who was blamed for world cup final loss and he guided the team to world cup victory in Australia.

Now we had the team, which lost badly in World cup, still everyone wanted to coach them (but one guy refused too), they had no worries from sponsors. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the guy who was responsible for numerous losses did not become coach (he is still playing the game), the team went to World cup without a coach and managed to bring the cup home.

PS: I know guys, this should be written tomorrow, but I am so excited, can’t control myself.

PPS: one more similarity, most experienced person in both teams was not the captain.

1. You can’t handle the truth (A Few Good Men)
2. Mama always said life is like a box of chocolates…(Forrest Gump)
3. Only human (The Matrix)
4. When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk (The Good, the Bad, The Ugly)
5. (I’ll) make him an offer he can’t refuse (The Godfather)
6. Show me the money (Jerry Maguire)
7. Hasta la vista, baby (T2)
8. May the force be with you (Star Wars)
9. To infinity and beyond (Toy Story)
10. I’ll be back (The Terminator)

Did I miss something???

Found out about the movie ‘Ek ruka hua faisala’ at Amrutha’s blog, And about ‘12 angry men’ from Venketesh’s comment. Downloaded it and saw over the weekend. It is one awesome movie, with good storyline and performances. Plot is simple, where twelve jurors are trying to figure out the defendant is guilty or not guilty based on the evidences. All evidences are against the defendant and everyone except one feels he is guilty. They go over all the evidences and reach a conclusion.

I recommend this movie to all those people who feel Bollywood movies can’t compete with Hollywood because of lack of budget. I would love to watch the Hindi version of it, but it would be very hard to find.

• APOLLO 13
• ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST
• DEAD POET’S SOCIETY
• BRAVEHEART
• ERIN BROCKOVICH
• A BEAUTIFUL MIND (Bonus – can’t remove it from list )

PS: I have not used bullets instead of numbers, as the order keeps changing as per my mood.